iPad What ereader app do you normally use?

[artbatista]

Marvin.

[greenasterisk]

I use Kobo

[Heitor]

iBooks: It was understandably my first option. Now it may seem limited when compared to Marvin, but it is not a bad reading app, and one has to concede that offering a lot of choices like Marvin is not Apple's way of doing things. The one feature that got me hooked on iBooks, instead of the once revered Stanza, was the ability of synchronizing reading positions, highlights and annotations. Nowadays I have an iPod Touch (5th generation) for ultra-portable reading (sorry, I don't think the iPad Mini would fit into my pocket) and a full-sized retina iPad (3th generation) for cozy reading at home. Being able to change devices easily is a must. I've heard of people who perform this syncing by hand. Honestly, I'd have to fall in love for an app to tolerate such a hassle (although I can understand people who chose to do it after falling in love for Marvin). For this same reason I've been turning down other apps that are highly rated around here (Bluefire and ShuBook come to mind). My iBooks library has increased considerably, and I don't have many reasons for complaint.

Kindle: As an Amazon customer, Kindle is a no-brainer. It is also a quite decent reading app. I like the Caecilia font a lot; the app runs smoothly; the Whispersync works like a charm; and I really, really appreciate the way dictionaries are handled (and it got even better after the iOS apps started accepting third-party dictionaries, what is very useful to language learners). And Amazon provides 5Gb of cloud storage for personal documents.

Readmill: I find it puzzling the little love Readmill has been getting around here. My first impression when trying it was: "such a beautiful display of text!" Since my days of e-reading on a Palm device (whose 320x480 resolution on a 3.7'' screen —therefore slightly inferior to the non-retina iPhone— was deemed high), when apps just showed text, with as few visual options as selecting font size, I feel glad that nowadays reading apps have been taking seriously the aesthetics of text display. Readmill excels at that point. Besides, it offers cloud storage for ebooks and all those bells and whistles of "social reading", which is rather interesting.

Marvin: What can I add to all the praising? Marvin surely puts iBooks to shame! Marvin is a joy to discover, in all its features. I have set up the configurable buttons to access some online bilingual dictionaries and translation services. This makes Marvin, besides Kindle, the best options for reading in a language being learned. Nevertheless, so far, I've been using Marvin far less than its alternatives, mostly because of the (temporary) lack of an iPhone version. You can bet I've been waiting anxiously for it! With Marvin 2.0, I'll certainly be transferring some ebooks from iBooks, Kindle and Readmill.

Kobo: I'm also a Kobo costumer, through its Brazilian partner, Livraria Cultura. It is ok, but nothing to write home about. I'll certainly not be sideloading ebooks on this thing. I've experienced some errors in the syncing of highlights, notes and reading positions. At least, I know Readmill is compatible with Adobe DRM, and this way I'm not stuck with Kobo.

GoodReader: My option for PDF ebooks. I see people in this forums have other choices, but I find GoodReader hard to beat. The margin cropping alone is worth it. I read PDFs only in the iPad, because squinting at them on a small screen doesn't fit my definition of reading pleasure. So, no syncing required.

[Heitor]

Today on eBookFriendly: 5 best book reading apps for iPhone and iPad

The list: Kindle, Google Play Books, Kobo, Readmill, and Marvin.

[maxyn83]

Stanza (now on ios7) - its still the best app for me. I've bought other apps like shubooks and megareader but I keep going back to stanza for it's easy transfer of books from calibre to stanza with metadata included. Unfortunately, the upgrade has lost its dictionary function so might look for another app soon. For now, still loving stanza!

Would like to try Marvin but it $5 for iphone

[Faterson]

If you did not hesitate to spend money on ShuBooks and MegaReader, you will not regret the $5 expense for Marvin. Marvin is Stanza on steroids. (And you can activate up to 5 various dictionaries simultaneously in Marvin!)

[holymadness]

Originally Posted by maxyn83

Stanza (now on ios7) - its still the best app for me. I've bought other apps like shubooks and megareader but I keep going back to stanza for it's easy transfer of books from calibre to stanza with metadata included. Unfortunately, the upgrade has lost its dictionary function so might look for another app soon. For now, still loving stanza!

Would like to try Marvin but it $5 for iphone

Buy Marvin. You won't regret it, especially if you read a lot.

[maxyn83]

Tnx for d advice. Seems that Marvin for ipad is free so will try it first before buying

[BeeTee-Ess]

My choice is Kindle, mainly because it syncs smoothly with my Kindle ereader.

I haven't tried it yet, but it now supports collections.

[Barty]

I read on an eink reader now, but when I use my iPad to read, I still find myself using Stanza. Marvin is excellent, too, but Stanza still does it for me.

[Faterson]

From my point of view, the trouble with Stanza is how inept it is at annotations, and that its dictionary lookup function has been dead for a couple of iOS versions now. If I wasn't annotating books or looking up words as I read, Stanza might indeed still be perfectly sufficient. That said, I hear it's been withdrawn from the App Store and can no longer be downloaded. For a dead app, though, Stanza is holding up ridiculously well (the supreme irony being iOS 7 inadvertently fixing some of Stanza's iOS 6 bugs), which must be embarrassing for its former competitors who are still around. Stanza got eaten alive by its bad stepmother Amazon, and only its child & heir apparent Marvin managed to escape.

[Emily Phillips]

I use Readmill; it syncs between devices and has a great interface. Supports ePubs and PDFs. Full disclosure: I also work for the company

[sun surfer]

I use iBooks. I tried it after first buying the mini and never looked back. While others call it simple, it has what I need, looks very nice and in fact has features that other more popular apps seem to lack (though I admit, I haven't looked around in awhile).

iBooks also, with ios7, now features multiple dictionaries including for several languages! While its one former dictionary was well enough (since it's so easy to just jump to the internet now to search for a really pesky definition if needed), having all these options are great, especially the Oxford dictionary which I really like and had really missed after leaving my Sony 950 for the iPad mini.

One very, very important feature for me in an app is highlights and annotations. iBooks does this very well, and gives me a way to export them very nicely. I'm curious because I haven't looked in awhile - do any other apps do this well? I'm not interested in "yes, but..." where the functionality is limited, but if another app does actually have a well-formed feature of this, I'd give it a look, even though I'm perfectly content with iBooks. But I am curious why Marvin is so popular.

[Faterson]

Emily, I'm sorry, but Readmill has a very simple interface that has very few customisation options.

iBooks is similarly not customisable. Particularly annoying are the far too wide empty page margins (particularly on the iPhone), inability to adjust paragraph spacing, and the ridiculous option of only 3 background reading colours, and only a handful of fonts.

Sun Surfer, annotations are one of the biggest iBooks failures. Try to export annotations from a DRM-protected book, and you will see what iBooks will do... export your comments without the highlights to which they are attached! It can't get any dumber than that. In contrast, Marvin provides a genuine export of annotations: in the standard HTML and XLS formats, as well as in its internal MRV format, with which you can back up / restore your annotations, as well as share them with other readers. iBooks does not begin to dream about such advanced functionality, and crudely exports everything via the body of an email.

Also, while there are more dictionaries in iOS 7 today than there used to be, the range offered is still ridiculously narrow. Where is the Russian dictionary, for example? Where are all the translation dictionaries (other than the Chinese-English one)? Where is the option to add your own dictionaries? And, iOS 7's implementation of the dictionaries, including those from Oxford, is fundamentally flawed, in making it impossible to search within the dictionaries, or to define words used in the definitions themselves. The biggest fail is that all the hyperlinks inside those dictionaries, including Apple's own dictionary, are dead! Plus, some of the dictionaries offered are of extremely poor quality, such as the German dictionary -- it fails to look up even some of the most basic words of the German language (if they are inflected in a book, as they most frequently will be). Far from being the pride of iBooks/iOS, dictionaries are, in fact, one of the greatest embarrassments for iBooks/iOS/Apple.

In contrast, in Marvin, you can set up up to 5 (!) dictionaries for simultaneous (!) use: all the iOS dictionaries that iBooks offers; plus any third-party dictionary app on your iDevice; plus any online dictionary -- all of them can be launched directly from within Marvin while reading a book, simply by touching a button. That's some service!

[FlorenceArt]

Originally Posted by Faterson

Sun Surfer, annotations are one of the biggest iBooks failures. Try to export annotations from a DRM-protected book, and you will see what iBooks will do... export your comments without the highlights to which they are attached! It can't get any dumber than that. In contrast, Marvin provides a genuine export of annotations: in the standard HTML and XLS formats, as well as in its internal MRV format, with which you can back up / restore your annotations, as well as share them with other readers. iBooks does not begin to dream about such advanced functionality, and crudely exports everything via the body of an email.

Oh, so Marvin supports DRM now? I've been a little out of touch but I thought it didn't.